God, Satan or You?
When religious people get sick, they usually blame God. They sometimes try to excuse God for His alleged decision to visit them with sickness by saying that He sent the sickness for a reason, such as testing their faith, working patience or some other fruit in their lives, drawing them closer to Himself, giving them a chance to witness to someone else at the hospital, and so on, ad nauseum.
Such people usually have the same misunderstanding that Job had. Job had no way to know that there was a real devil who caused his problems, so he blamed all his troubles on God. However, people who have the entire Bible for enlightenment don’t have the right to plead ignorance and make God the scapegoat for their problems.
The discussion Who or What Causes Sickness? proves that the ultimate cause of sickness being on the earth at all is Satan. Who gave Satan the right to work such mayhem on the earth? It wasn’t God, it was man – namely, Adam. Adam had the right to sin and let the devil into the earth, and he did so. God did not revoke man’s right to run the earth (Psalm 115:16) even after such blatant mismanagement. Satan has the right to be here to do his agenda of stealing, killing and destroying. However, that does not indicate God’s approval of Satan’s actions. The Son of God was manifested to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8).
Even though Satan is the ultimate source of sickness and corruption on the earth, we have to look at another facet of things. Some physical problems aren’t caused by either God or the devil; they’re self-inflicted.
One cause of self-inflicted sickness is violating natural laws. If you live on a diet of gummy worms, French fries and cola, you will have physical problems that you cannot blame on either God or the devil.
I sometimes drop something on purpose while I’m preaching and ask, “Who made that fall, God or the devil?” The obvious answer is neither one. God is the author of the law of gravity, but what happened was a result of a law that was in the earth. Neither God nor Satan needed to take direct action to make the object fall. It is the same with the “diet of worms” above. The health problems that result would only be due to natural laws that God created, not the direct action of either God or the devil.
If you think that the Bible is only “spiritual” and never mentions natural topics like eating sweets, guess again! It is clear that God considers sweets good in moderation.
Proverbs 24:13:
My son, eat thou honey, because it is good; and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste.
Proverbs 25:16:
Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it.
Proverbs 25:27:
It is not good to eat much honey: so for men to search their own glory is not glory.
Excessive eating of sweets will lead to weight gain and other issues for which neither God nor the devil will be responsible. However, you can use natural laws another way. If you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight. This is just the way things work; no direct supernatural action is involved. Now if you have a thyroid condition or something else that makes weight loss very difficult, you can believe God for healing. A woman who couldn’t seem to lose weight due to a thyroid condition came to one of our church services when we had a guest speaker, and she left not only seeing out of a formerly blind eye, but without her thyroid issue. She came back the next week six pounds lighter! Her doctor was amazed and asked what she had done, given that they had tried about everything and nothing had worked. She said, “I went to church!” And her doctor actually told her, “I recommend that you go back to that church!”
Another cause of self-inflicted illness is being on the wrong side of spiritual laws. Proverbs 11:17 warns you that if you are cruel, you trouble your own flesh. It does not say that God will punish you by troubling your flesh or even that you will open up a door for the devil to trouble your flesh. It is something you are doing to yourself because you are on the wrong side of the spiritual law expressed in that verse. It is something you are doing to your own body!
I want you to notice something very interesting in the following passage:
Galatians 6:7-8:
Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
For he that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.
Most people think that this says, “If you sow to the flesh, God will punish you.” But that ISN’T what it says about sowing to the flesh! It doesn’t say that you will reap corruption from God. The good side of this comes from God in the person of the Holy Spirit, but you reap corruption from the flesh! In other words, it isn’t God explicitly punishing you for your fleshly behavior, and it isn’t the devil walking through a door you opened, either. Your fleshly behavior results in built-in punishment. It’s a spiritual law. The bad results you get aren’t from God or the devil any more than God or the devil makes something fall on the floor if you lift it up and let go of it.
The Scriptures do link bad health to certain sins. For examples, homosexuals reap the natural results of their depravity. Paul didn’t explicitly say, “God puts it on them.” They “reap in themselves” just punishment. They are violating a law God has placed in the earth and they reap the consequences.
Romans 1:27:
And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
Envy is linked to bone trouble.
Proverbs 14:30:
A sound heart is the life of the flesh: but envy the rottenness of the bones.
While the King James text of Proverbs 12:25 doesn’t read this way, most modern translations render it along these lines: “Anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him (or it) down.” The New King James Version reads, “Anxiety in the heart of man causes depression…” The same Hebrew word translated anxiety in other translations is actually translated anxiety even in the King James version in Ezekiel 4:16, Ezekiel 12:18 and Ezekiel 12:19. So the sin of worry can lead to trouble without any direct intervention by God or the devil. You have probably noticed the ill results that anxiety has produced in your body when you indulge in it.
So some illnesses are not the devil attacking you, nor are they God punishing you for your sin. They’re simply things you bring on yourself due to the way God has set things up.
I knew a woman who smoked four packs of cigarettes a day and ended up with cancer, which can be a natural result of such a habit. She was “believing God for healing” while continuing to smoke four packs a day. She died of cancer. That was not God punishing her; it was the natural result of continuing to suck carcinogens into her body.
Having said all that, you’ll be glad to know that the fact that you brought something on yourself doesn’t mean that you have to live with it! Consider Psalm 107:17-20. Many of us can quote verse 20, but did you notice that in context, God sent His word and healed people whose sicknesses were their own doing! Surely Jesus encountered people in the multitudes who had brought things on themselves when He healed every kind of sickness and disease. He is the same today, so He is just as willing to heal self-inflicted problems as He ever was!
Of course, prudence would dictate that if you made yourself sick and you got healed supernaturally, you would stop doing what made you sick in the first place to avoid getting sick again.